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Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona
Departament d'Empresa

Seminari Rocío Bonet

30 nov. 2022
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In Seminar Room E2 at 15:00h 

Seminari

Rocío Bonet (IE Business School) will present her paper “Do too many cooks spoil the broth? How reporting to multiple managers affects worker performance”, joint work with Fabrizio Salvador (IE Business School) and Athena Tsouderou (University of Miami). 

Abstract 

 The pursuit of agility is a sweeping trend across modern organizations, which fluidly redeploy workers across different managers in order to adapt to a turbulent environment. While fluid organizational arrangements promise a better matching of human capital to organizational needs, they also create complex authority overlays whose effects on worker performance remain remarkably underexplored. Drawing from research on time pressure and monitoring, we argue that the number of managers concurrently assigning tasks to a worker—a concept we refer to as “span of reporting”—has both benefits and costs for worker performance. We also argue that these costs can be mitigated if managers are embedded in previous interactions as they should find it easier to coordinate when assigning tasks to the shared worker. Using data from a Fortune 500 application services organization, we find that span of reporting has a U-shaped association with the time it takes a worker to complete a task. Furthermore, the optimal span of reporting increases with task-driven, role-driven, and location-driven embeddedness among the managers supervising a common worker. Our results contribute to the literatures on agile and matrixed organizations, and to the classical debate on the opposing principles of unity of command and multiple foremaship. 

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